Bring dead data on an SD card back to life with the power of Arduino

It would seem that there is more than one way to access an SD Card, and the usual interface used by your devices called SDIO can be the failure point preventing you from accessing your data. The alternative method is called SPI mode which is significantly slower but also less complex which means that when SDIO fails you may still be able to access and copy your data using SPI mode. Over at Hack a Day you can read about how to use a Playduino One Arduino clone and a SD card shield along with some custom Python scripts to recover those vacation snaps.

"A few days ago, one of [Severin]‘s SD cards died on him, Instead of trashing the card, he decided to investigate what was actually wrong with the card and ended up recovering most of the data using an Arduino and an immense amount of cleverness."